Munich-based robotics startup Microagi has raised $55m in Germany's largest ever seed round, led by VC firm Hummingbird with participation from Northzone, Local Globe, Village Global and Redalpine. Founded roughly 10 months ago by former Formula 1 engineers, the company collects factory and household data to train next-generation humanoid bots.

CEO Bercan Kilic, a former Red Bull Racing engineer, warns Europe's manufacturing industry will crumble without heavy investment in robot automation. "It's one-billionth of what Europe needs," he says of the funding. CTO Nico Nussbaum explains their data collection: engineers wear cameras on-site at factories and homes, gathering data on tasks like sorting and cleaning, with the system learning from real operations monthly.

Kilic notes training models are more advanced in the West while China leads hardware. At the Machina robotics conference in Paris, timelines for competent humanoids varied radically — one investor predicted 10 years for autonomous shirt-ironing, but Kilic forecasts a humanoid handling roughly 10 routine tasks autonomously within a year, with complex tasks like plumbing taking far longer.